East Meets West

As introduced by the Yearbook of Republic of China:

Contact with the West

China's modern history begins when the three pillars of Chinese stability -- rule by historical precedent, bureaucratic conservatism, and village-based economics -- were shaken by contact with the West.

For thousands of years, China maintained close relations with nation states on its periphery. These border states often served as intermediaries between China and other major civilizations in India and the Middle East. As far back as the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-221 A.D.), China was exporting silk, porcelain, and other trade goods to the Roman Empire. During the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), China's Mongolian rulers, especially Kublai Khan, brought a significant number of Persians, Turks, and other peoples from Central Asia to work in the Mongolian administration. The great Italian traveler, Marco Polo, visited China during this time and actually worked for the Mongolians as a superintendent of trade in Lanzhou.

Early in the 15th century, an ambitious Ming monarch, Cheng Tsu (commonly referred to as the Yung Lo Emperor), showed an intense interest in overseas exploration. He equipped scores of seafaring ships, manned by tens of thousands of sailors, and placed them under the command of one of his closest advisors, the eunuch Cheng Ho. In the years between 1406 and 1433, Cheng Ho made seven voyages through the South China Sea, past the Malaysian Peninsula, into the Indian Ocean and to the east coast of Africa. His travels to more than 50 countries constituted the greatest overseas venture in Chinese history.

Two main sea routes linking the East and West were discovered during the Ming dynasty, and, by the early 16th century, Portugal, Spain, Holland, and England were sending powerful fleets to Asian waters. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach China by sea. With the permission of Ming officials, the Portuguese set up an entrepot in Macau in 1535. In the following years, many Christian missionaries came to China on Portuguese ships. In 1601, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci was granted an imperial stipend to reside in Peking. Other missionaries soon followed in his footsteps. Julius Aleni, Johannes Terrens, Didacus de Pentoja, Johannes Adam Schall von Bell, and Ferdiandus Verbiest brought not only their religion but also new concepts of arts, medical science, and water conservancy, not to mention mathematics, geography, astronomy, and the Gregorian calendar. Like in the Yuan dynasty, some of these intrepid Christians even served as officials in the imperial bureaucracy.

China's Closed-door Policy

The Manchus established the Qing dynasty in 1644. During their rule over China, the Manchus subdued the remnants of Mongol resistance in the northwest, and conquered the Khalkhas, the Kalmuks, and the Turks. They also formally annexed Outer and Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Tibet, thereby fixing the modern boundaries of China. In 1683, Qing forces took over Taiwan.

At the height of Qing power, the Manchus utilized the best minds and richest human resources of the country, regardless of race, to carry out many scholarly projects. However, Western missionaries -- active in China since the end of the Ming -- lost the trust of the Yung Cheng Emperor due to their role in a power struggle for the throne. Christianity was banned in 1724, and the flow of Western technology into China slowed to a trickle thereafter.

During the entire 18th century and the early 19th century, the Qing court adopted a virtual closed-door policy toward the Western world while Europe was being transformed and invigorated by the rise of rationalism, nationalism, colonialism, and ultimately the industrial revolution.

Breaking Down the Door

The Western powers, however, were not content to leave China isolated, as they coveted Chinese markets and resources. They were dissatisfied with perennial trade deficits with China, unhappy about being treated unequally by the royal court of China which viewed trade as bestowing a favor, and chafed at being restricted to doing business in several small ports. High productivity in light and heavy industries drove European countries (especially England) outward in a search for markets and resources. By the early 18th century, England dominated overseas trade, having gained dominance of the seas over Spain and Holland. During the next century, colonialism and resource exploitation backed by military force went hand in hand with the push to develop overseas markets by major European nations.

The seeds of the Opium War of 1839-42 were sown in a worsening trade relationship between Great Britain and the Qing court. The Qing government was desperate about the loss of the 1.8 million silver taels its populace was spending on 30,000 chests (each containing more than 100 catties) of opium each year. In January 1839, Qing Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu was made responsible for stamping out the opium trade. He closed down 13 guilds in Guangdong after foreign merchants such as Lancelot Dent refused to yield all the opium stored on Lingding Island. The foreign merchants finally gave in and handed more than 20,000 chests of opium to Lin who, to the great dismay of the drug dealers, promptly burnt it. In July 1840, British warships occupied Dinghai and headed for Tianjin. In August, Dagu was attacked. A Qing official Chi Shan gave way to English demands for indemnity and ceded Hong Kong to England. But England was not satisfied with the agreement. So the British government sent a new plenipotentiary, Henry Pottinger, who attacked Amoy in 1841, Shanghai in 1842, and then set off for Nanking. The Treaty of Nanking was then signed on August 29, 1842. It has proved to be the most important treaty in China's modern history, for it was the first of a series of unequal treaties signed with Western powers. The Treaty of Nanking also marked the beginning of a long period of internal turmoil and external concession for China over the next 150 years.

The 13 articles in the treaty stipulated that five ports were to be opened for British trade and consulates were to be established there; Hong Kong was ceded to England; 21 million silver taels were to be paid in four installments. Supplementary clauses signed later further stipulated consulate jurisdiction over Englishmen residing in China.

After the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, Belgium, Holland, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, the United States, and France also asked to establish consulates in China. In 1844, the Treaty of Wanghsia was concluded with the United States, stating that the US would enjoy whatever privileges China granted to other nations. This was equivalent to China granting most-favored nation status to the US. Later that year, the Treaty of Whampoa was signed with France.

By signing the Treaty of Nanking, China agreed to open five ports, including Canton, to foreign trade. However, the residents of Canton at first refused to allow Englishmen to enter the city and then attacked the Englishmen already there. In early 1856, a French missionary was killed in Guangxi. Later that year the Arrow Incident occurred, in which a Hong Kong-registered ship (i.e., under the protection of the English government), the Arrow, was searched in Canton by Qing soldiers and 12 of its sailors were arrested. All these incidents finally led to an Anglo-French expedition against Peking in 1858 and the burning of the imperial summer palace by invading troops. The Qing court was thus compelled to make further concessions in the 1860 Treaty of Peking.

The signing of these treaties led to a flood of Western merchants with their foreign goods -- better, cheaper textiles, kerosene and lamps, cigarettes and opium. Consequently, the old Chinese system collapsed and the village economy -- the backbone of China's agricultural society that had sustained Chinese civilization for millennia -- lay in tatters.

The proud imperial bureaucracy and the mandarin elite became useless this time. They were entirely ignorant of the new forces to which China was being subjected. Their training had been in the old Chinese classics, and their experience had not prepared them to meet the new challenge. The scholarly elite were no more capable of dealing with the situation than the eunuchs who served the wives and concubines of the imperial families in the Forbidden City.

Reformers in the Qing court, however, were aware of the superiority of Western armaments. In 1861, the Han generals Tseng Kuo-fan, Li Hung-chang, and Tso Tsung-tang were able to convince the Qing court to initiate a 30-year "Self-strengthening" program. Under the new program, the Qing dynasty began to train translators, import Western military technology, and set up armories. The Zongli Yamen was set up to manage foreign affairs. The self-strengthening program, however, came too late. Further controversies with Russia in the northwest and with England and France in the southwest jeopardized the stability of the Qing dynasty. A war with France ended with the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin in 1885. In the later half of the 19th century, China lost its suzerain rights and sovereignty over the Indo-China Peninsula and large areas of the northwest.

Chinese and Japanese spheres of influence overlapped in Korea, and Japan was showing interest in taking over Taiwan. The Qing court sent Liu Yung-fu and his armies to safeguard the island. Unfortunately, the military modernization undertaken during the self-strengthening program proved to be a complete failure when war between China and Japan finally broke out in 1894. Japan quickly breached the Chinese defenses and sank most of her northern navy. The Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed the next year, compelling the Qing to pay a huge indemnity, open its seaports, recognize the independence of Korea, and cede the Liaodong Peninsula, Taiwan, and the Pescadores to Japan.

The repeated defeats that China suffered at the hands of foreign powers, the weakness and incompetence of the Qing court, and the success of the Meiji Reformation in Japan prompted many thinking Chinese to take action. Under the leadership of Kang Yu-wei and Liang Chi-chao, a reform movement was initiated in 1898. The Kuang Hsu Emperor sympathized with this movement, but met with strong opposition from his aunt, the Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi, and other conservative elements in the Qing court. The movement came to an inglorious end after only 100 days and was followed by a coup d'etat in which the Kuang Hsu Emperor was imprisoned by the Empress Dowager. Those who had played leading parts in the movement were executed or exiled.

Popular discontent with internal misgovernment and anti-foreign sentiment aroused by the unequal treaties combined to spark the Boxer Uprising in 1900. The Boxers laid siege to the foreign legation in Peking, where a combined force of Japanese, French, British, Russian, and American troops held out for over a month. The siege was broken when the forces of eight foreign powers marched from Tientsin and scaled the walls of Peking. The foreign powers then took the opportunity to loot Peking in one of the most disgraceful episodes of modern diplomatic history. In the signing of the Treaty of Peking the following year, China was disarmed and forced to pay large indemnities. This treaty was regarded as the most humiliating of all the unequal treaties.

One of the foreign powers sacking Peking, Russia, also took the opportunity to occupy Manchuria. When the troops of the other foreign powers withdrew from Chinese territory, Russia refused to leave Manchuria. This led to conflicts of interest with Japan and to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Through the Treaty of Portsmouth signed in 1905, a victorious Japan obtained complete control over Korea and rights and interests in southern Manchuria, leaving the north to Russia. Thereafter, Manchuria and Mongolia became flash points of further conflict between Japan and Russia, with China as the only loser.